Fifteen Eighty Four

Volume 6 of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, spanning June 1934 through June 1936, includes 366 items of correspondence, directed to 116 recipients. In our introductions to the volume, we note that Hemingway’s enthusiasm for the growing sport of deep-sea fishing is a dominant theme of his letters of this period. Accordingly, in the photos we selected for the plates section, Hemingway poses alongside some dozen billfish caught by himself or his friends, just a small sampling of the extensive photographic record of the piscatorial adventures related in the letters. The fish–marlin, tuna, sharks, and others–appear in our notes to the volume, too, as Hemingway’s detailed fishing logs proved to be a rich source of information the editors could draw upon to date undated letters and to identify the author’s many visitors who joined him to fish aboard his prized new cabin cruiser Pilar. He spends most of his time during the period fishing and working in Key West, in the Bimini islands of the Bahamas, and in Havana, Cuba. He assisted ichthyologists in a scientific study of Atlantic game fish, was recognized as a  pioneering authority in saltwater angling techniques, and made a number of record catches himself, including landing the first tuna in Bimini waters to be brought in intact, unmutilated by sharks. 

Nevertheless, this latest volume in the comprehensive, scholarly edition of the American author’s correspondence is not only about fish. During the period covered by this volume Hemingway publishes his experimental nonfiction novel Green Hills of Africa (1935); writes a regular series of articles he calls “Letters” for Esquire magazine; organizes U.S. art exhibitions for Cuban painter Antonio Gattorno and for Spanish etcher Luis Quintanilla, the latter jailed in Madrid on political charges; and participates in hurricane relief efforts in the Florida Keys, after which he writes a scathing article for the leftist magazine The New Masses criticizing the federal government’s failure to evacuate hundreds of war veterans who died in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. The volume reveals Hemingway to be a man of both words and action.

This volume also offers a candid glimpse of Hemingway’s generosity, a side of his character that might surprise some readers who are primarily familiar with the author’s public persona. The Hemingway whom readers encounter in the Letters Volume 6 is quick to loan money to friends, to offer his time, boat, and expertise to scientists studying broadbill species in the Gulf Stream, and to offer words of comfort to a grieving friend who lost a son. Hemingway is sometimes viewed in a negative light for his part in literary rivalries, and, admittedly, during the course of this volume he does beat up poet Wallace Stevens in a fistfight, and he has some rather rude things to say about his former mentor Gertrude Stein. However, in his other interactions with established and aspiring writers in the letters of Volume 6, we see a different side of the famous author–that of the successful professional writer wielding his talent and influence to help others.

Arnold Gingrich, the editor of Esquire, had enjoyed great success with the men’s magazine he established in 1933–its growing circulation thanks in part to Hemingway’s regular contributions–but he also wanted to find success as a novelist himself, too. He told Hemingway that he had been working on the magazine until 10 or 11 pm every night, after which he worked on his manuscript. Hemingway had constructive criticism for Gingrich in a letter of 18 August 1934: “You have this ungodly amount of drive and energy and like everybody you like to show off the thing you do best which is probably to over-work. But no matter how good a paragraph it would make for your obituary how you ran this mag days and wrote a novel nights. That is not the way to write a novel.”

Hemingway was a disciplined, methodical writer. He typically worked in the mornings, reading over the previous day’s output before starting work, and stopping when he knew what would happen next. Concerned that his friend was trying to write too much too quickly, he advised Gingrich in a letter of 25 October 1934, “That 5,000–10,000 words at a time is the way you get fun out of writing all right. The hell of it is that it isnt the way you give it to the reader —”

He offered similar guidance to Joseph Hopkins, an aspiring writer who had written to Hemingway for advice. In a letter of 31 December 1935, one of six to the younger writer included in this volume, Hemingway advised: “Take it easy and write a good one and remember you have to write them a sentence and a paragraph at a time and not just with a vague general ambition.” Hemingway’s advice here anticipates a similar, and now-famous, passage in his memoir A Moveable Feast, posthumously published in 1964. In that book, Hemingway recalls advising himself, “‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.” In a 20 November 1935 letter to Prudencio de Pereda, Hemingway advised the up-and-coming novelist and translator, “the thing to do is write and keep on writing.”

Not all of Hemingway’s correspondents would go on to successful writing careers. He warned one Mr. Duffield against going into the newspaper business if trying to become a writer–Hemingway’s having had some first-hand experience with this route himself–and instead advised that “The only way to learn to write fiction is to write it or try to write it and you have as much time for that with your present job – and the advantage of eating regularly.” We can only speculate that Mr. Duffield kept his day job, whatever it was, and his identity remains unconfirmed.

Hemingway acknowledged the influence he exerted on other writers. In a letter of 3 August 1934 to Edwin Balmer, editor of Redbook magazine and former mentor of Hemingway’s,  Hemingway acknowledged his own distinctive style and its peculiar effect in less capable hands: “I dislike the birds who imitate my stuff […] They copy the awkwardnesses that get into my prose through the difficulty of stating something completely or making the reader feel something that is not stated and think that is a style. I would have avoided those awkwardnesses if I could and where I use a word because it is inevitable and I have to have it in, they scatter them in as seasoning or to show how tough they think they are.”

Readers and critics did not always understand his work, but Hemingway wrote without regard to critical or popular opinion, trusting audiences to catch up to him eventually. Referring to his 1932 nonfiction book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, he wrote to his Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins on 17 December 1935, “You may have noticed how this last which was hailed as lousy when it came out is now referred to with the hushhushes.” Likewise, he understood that Green Hills of Africa, reviews of which had been mixed, was ahead of its time. Refusing to compromise his artistic integrity or bend to literary fashions, he dismissed the critics, declaring in a letter to Perkins of 20 April 1936 that he would never again “notice them, mention them, pay any attention to them, nor read them.” Rather, he wrote, “Am going to work by myself, for myself and for the long future as I have always done.” In the Letters of Volume 6 we see many sides of Hemingway, but it is this, his dedication to his craft, that underlies all the rest.